The Book of Heaven: A Novel (18 page)

“It has been my honor and my task,” he said, “to acquire for you the fruits of this voyage, most important, the cook I found among the Grateful Ones, who will make your entertainments famous.” He caught sight of Savour in the shadow, and smiled with candid pleasure. “Welcome, Savour,” he said. “Life is Paradise.” Savour felt a rush of warmth and gratitude.

He turned again to the Princess. “I promise you that she will fulfill your expectations. I have tasted her work under the poor conditions a ship affords a cook; but even there, she wrought magic at our table. The animals she cooked tasted as if their blood was the distilled attar of roses. I swear that if she pours you a cup of water, it will taste like fresh cream.”

“I hope I will find her as you describe,” the Princess answered, and without turning, said graciously to Savour. “You may be excused. Take her to her quarters.” Her eyes had never left the Priest's face; “Tell me about your travels,” she said, and gestured toward a seat.

Savour hurried quickly back behind the jade-wearing attendant, descending through the same labyrinths they had climbed. She walked without seeing, still listening to what she had heard. Like many who practice her craft, her response to events was powerfully physical.

The exchange between the Priest and Princess had been like the folktales in which two sorcerers try to capture and escape each other by changing forms; if one became a mouse, the other a cat, the one a door, the other a key, the one a window, the other a beam of light, and so on.

She tried to apply Gate's principle that you must use the materials you understood to translate what you did not understand. If she were not mistaken, she had seen a woman offering herself to a man like a goblet of wine, and a man returning the goblet as if he were not thirsty.

She worked with Gate's technique of comprehending what she had seen by tasting the flavor of her own feelings.

She felt the delicious milky reassurance, as if she were a lamb in a shepherd's arms, which had welled up inside her at the warmth of the High Priest's greeting.

And then suddenly, she felt an unexpected nauseating anxiety, a sensation of illness that washed over her before she recognized it as an insight. What her body had recorded, caught between the two sensations, was the essence of entrapment.

She was in the thoughts of these two, the Priest and the Princess, not as herself, but as an instrument of themselves, and of whatever they were to each other. She could even, she realized with shock, be sold again.

As she returned to the deep region of the kitchens, she seemed to herself to be falling. It occurred to her for the first time that a world might exist in which one was not rewarded for excellence, but despised for it. Her craft had always been her protection. Her entire education had formed her as its selfless servant. But now Savour was the protégée of the High Priest, who had his uses for her work; and she was the servant of the Princess, who had her own.

Over the next months, Salt was her guide, and fortunately a trustworthy one, to the world she had come to. He introduced her to farmers, merchants, and to the public markets, so that she could ensure the excellence of her kitchen materials. No table of dignity must be able to match the table she presented.

He began to show her the areas of the countryside where most of the indigenous inhabitants of the New Kingdom were allowed to live and farm. Indigenous houses made of native stone punctuated the landscape. The shapes of the houses reminded her of the round form of the native bread, as if these houses had not been built, but leavened by the wild yeast that lifted the loaves they kneaded and set out in wicker baskets.

Salt took her to meet his parents and eleven brothers and sisters. These were the second family she had ever met in her entire life, the Angelical Royals having been the first.

She marveled at their resemblance to one another, but also at the range of their faces. She couldn't stop staring at them. The continuity but variety of the features gave her a sense of something endless.

She was fascinated by their names, which expressed the most precise nuances of human experience, some of which existed only in her imagination, and others unknown even to her fancy.

She couldn't absorb them all that day, but she remembered a twin brother and sister: he had been given a name that meant a beacon of fire guiding lost travelers, and she had been named for the feeling of warmth from a hearth fire on a winter's night.

Savour could hardly conceal her fascination with the sister, who was a bride and pregnant. Savour was familiar with all sorts of pregnant animals, but had never been so close to a pregnant human or seen at firsthand that extraordinary melon shape of the stomach, the child under its dome.

They sat at a table in their courtyard outdoors, fourteen people and one guest. Never had she sat at a table with a family to eat. Never had she been served food by anyone else. They had milled their own wheat, churned their own butter, and each loaf carried the initials of the one it was destined for.

They ate nothing they had not grown. They seemed to experience everything in the world as familial; they had even begotten their own food. In their granary, they kept a store of seeds from all the Indigenous territories, a library of what the local earth yielded and what sustained their people.

Each taste at their table was absolute. When she ate the red currants they offered her, she tasted summer, defining itself against all other seasons. She tasted the color red of that brilliance. “I can taste no further of this fruit on this earth,” she said solemnly. “I have tasted here its existence in our life and in the one to come.”

It was a strange and unnerving sensation for Savour, these fourteen people implicated together in their lives, clustering together like grapes on a vine, each with a specific place at the table.

She could find no one sense of it; it was sweet, sour, abundant, oppressive. She watched them share dishes, refill glasses in anticipation of a sibling's or cousin's needs. Were these actions made of manners, custom, or love? This company was so practiced in being together. What happened as their ages changed? What happened when the young ones lost their childish charm, and could no longer be corrected? How would you replace the ones who vanished?

Afterward, Salt walked with her through the fields and orchard near the house. To walk with him through a wheat field was like learning yet another language, where even the angles of the stalks had meaning. “The Angels are gradually resettling us on smaller plots of land. So I am working with plants that yield well, but are compactly shaped, so I can plant the maximum number,” he said.

He picked up a grain of wheat that had dropped to the ground. “Look at this. This is a greater construction than all the palaces and fortresses of the world. Bury it, and it will surge from the earth. It is the architecture of life.” He kissed it, as was the custom of the Indigenes.

Savour had not cultivated a garden since childhood, but she recognized a discoloration in one stand as a sign of disease, and pointed it out to Salt. They were searching for a remedy, he said, frowning, though they had no answer yet. His iron tranquillity made Savour wonder whether the Indigenes might not prevail after all against the Angels. The Angels were soldiers, and their conquest of the Indigenes was absolute. But the Indigenes were farmers; the work of making things grow was eternally woven with loss and devastation. The Angels worked with nothing that was not man-made; the Indigenes worked with what was given by the gods.

Salt took her on expeditions through the Angelic capital, which they had renamed Paradise after their conquest. Paradise teemed with tradespeople from all the territories conquered by the Angels. There were many merchants, too, from the bordering country of the Saints, which lay in the northwest beyond the Alpine passes. Salt told her that it was generally assumed that Saints were spies, whether on behalf of their own nation or employed by the Angels to report on the next nation they had chosen to annex.

He showed her the courtyard where the Invisibles were auctioned to buyers from all over the world. She saw a phantom of herself standing on the auction block, and shuddered. Salt realized, with a flood of guilt, what she was seeing, and hurried her past it to the exquisite public gardens of Paradise, extending through the city down to the port.

It was in these gardens that the black roses the New Kingdom was known for were cultivated; these were the source of the glittering dark sapphire conserves of rose, and the blue-black petals sparkling with sugar crystals that were the base of several of the New Kingdom's traditional sweets. A pendant of deep blue glass or sapphire recalling these roses was a traditional wedding gift, Salt explained to Savour.

At the very heart of the gardens, in the center of an orchard of agate trees, grew the Tree That Was Once a Woman, sacred to the Indigenes, and loathed by the Angelical conquerors as a symbol of sacrilege and indigenous rebellion. A violent faction of Angels perpetually threatened to uproot it; the tree was always ringed by armed guards, in order to prevent the conflict that must inevitably follow.

“Why should this tree matter?” Savour asked. She looked at it closely, to the extent she dared, under the hostile gaze of the guards.

It was a thick-branched tree laden at this season with abundant ovals of golden-skinned fruit resembling women's breasts. The tree almost seemed to be singing because of the rich chorale of birdsong from the coloratura birds that nested in its branches.

“Why should a soufflé matter?” Salt asked, walking her around the tree, but well back from the guards.

“I see what you mean.” Savour tilted her head, thinking. “A soufflé matters because it is a dream, a dream that can be eaten. Which is why people are so afraid of making them. A soufflé always evokes a resurrection, a second life. I often served soufflés made of cheese to sick people, so they would know the taste of being made new—as I make cheese, a preserved food, fresh again, with new eggs and milk.”

“Yes,” Salt said. “When they finish your soufflé, the guests should feel as if they had had their fortunes told, and that the future is happy. The Tree That Was Once a Woman is like that, she tells a fortune; to our ears, it is a good fortune, to the Angelicals a bad omen.” Savour looked at him expectantly.

“We are taught she was an Indigene girl, of wit and grace, though neither a princess nor a great beauty. In the legends, she was one who discovered how to make the conserves of black roses that you yourself have now mastered. She was a singer, and we say when we don't know the author of a song, that she has composed it. When the first Angelical invasion occurred several hundred years ago, their commander captured her and forced her to marry him.

“However, among our women there is a wedding custom that must be followed, or the marriage will never be considered legitimate. During their wedding week, they prepare a special spiced butter of our native agate fruit, enough for a year, which will be stored in ceramic jars, and used to flavor all sorts of dishes. It is a form of wealth, because for us, food and drink is wealth; this is the means of life. As the song says, ‘Bread makes the body, love makes the soul.'

“So the agate butter is a dowry, and a sign of the acceptance of a marriage in providing for its future. When it is withheld, it is known that the marriage is false, and the children of the union bastards.

“The commander took this girl, put her through a marriage ceremony, and enjoyed her, though he knew very well she had not consented, which is a grave sacrilege among our people.

“But he could not force her to fill the empty jars in his storeroom, or even to tell him how the butter was made. She knew he would then have the jars filled, and claim that he now had proof that she had accepted him at last. He held her, a prisoner-wife, while her songs circulated from hand to mouth, as, aware of her coming death, she changed her flesh into words. Her stubborn refusal of the forced marriage became a symbol of our own captivity and our own refusal of the rule of Angels.

“The commander could not afford to remain the repudiated husband of his entire New Kingdom, so she died of ‘natural causes' and was buried here, with a cluster of the fruits in the palms of her hands. These grew up into the great orchards that are like wordless portraits of this woman. They are the glory of the Indigene gardens.

“Her name was vanished from the country, never to be uttered, on pain of death. We no longer know what it was. The bride's songs, too, were forbidden, under the threat of harsh penalty. In that vacuum, we too died, with our knowledge of our own history and traditions, our obscure dreams of what we might become.

“The fruit of these agate trees dropped to the ground unused, because it is rock hard and bitter without our traditional method of rendering it edible. Even the coloratura birds that make their nests in these trees will not attempt to eat this fruit. We worked and served, and our children played in these orchards, to the odd, syncopated tunes of the coloraturas, until they, too, were old enough to work and serve.

“One day, one of these children heard the songs of the birds in a new way. They were more than a pleasing accompaniment to his games; intrigued, he found a way to enter the songs, by writing down their patterns.

“He drummed the patterns of the tunes, as he transcribed them, sitting outdoors in the narrow alley of tangled houses where he lived.

“An old woman lay nearby on a pallet in the sun, like fruit drying for storage. She had been silent for years after a seizure, and her life consisted of being moved outdoors in good weather and indoors in bad.

“But her mouth suddenly moved and in a voice like a dried leaf being crushed, she sang words to these rhythms. The melodies of the bride's songs had been based on the patterns of the coloratura tunes. They had been hidden, but never lost. They were inside the throats of birds, notes pulsing like jewels in the sun, songs preserved for us in the heavens themselves. And they were buried inside human tombs, like the old woman.